Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Total Spent: None indicated| Rating: 8

Pros:

Built like a tank

Cons:

A lot of purple fringing

This lens is incredibly rugged, solid and heavy. It's far bigger than my previous Zenitar 16/2,8 that covers full frame, maybe due to water & dust seals. Good sharpness, but not stellar, and A LOT of purple fringing (not CA). For fisheye fans only.

smak

Registered: December 2006Posts: 2

Olympus 8mm f/3.5 Zuiko Digital Fisheye review by smak

Review Date: 12/24/2006

Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Total Spent: None indicated| Rating: 9

Pros:

Incredible build quality, high image-quality, great fun to use.

Cons:

Not cheap, relatively heavy and large, of limited use.

The first thing I noticed with this lens is it's incredible build quality. The barrel is all metal, it is weathersealed, there's a nice metal lenscap, and it simply says "quality item" from every angle. The downside of this is that it is relatively heavy, and large-ish. (especially for a 4/3 lens)

Optically this lens is very good; it focuses very close too, which is useful with a fisheye. The downside is there's some purple fringing in high-contrast areas on the edge of the frame, but this seems hard to avoid with fisheyes. The effect becomes less with the aperture stopped down a bit. Flare-resistance is truly excellent.

The huge 180-degree angle of view is great fun to use, but the fisheye-distortion may make this lens of limited use to some people; but, the images can be "de-fished" automatically using Olympus Studio software, which makes this lens into a normal superwide.

The price is high, but considering the good build-quality and good optical quality not outrageous. The results are unique, and it can be a real "problem solver", or simply a very nice toy...